Solution Brief

IT Seeking Faster Infrastructure OptionsToday’s pace demands more complete solutionsOrganizations continue to exert pressure on IT to be faster and reduce costs. However, the majority of IT budgets are spent on maintaining equipment, leaving only a small amount for new projects and innovation. In cases in which IT has the funds to deploy new systems, it typically takes weeks, if not months, of design, planning, procurement, deployment, and testing for IT to do so.

To reduce the time and cost of deploying infrastructure and applications, organizations are adopting a converged infrastructure approach. According to one industry analyst, “In a few years, we’ll move away from people buying the piece parts... Whatever they buy has to be designed and tested to work together.”1 By deploying converged solutions that leverage shared resources, IT teams are slashing design, planning, and testing phases by months.

FlexPod Accelerates Application DeploymentPrevalidated architectures reduce time and risk for leading applicationsEnterprises and service providers alike need tested, documented, and supported infrastructure solutions that support both virtualized and nonvirtualized environments. They seek solutions that can leverage existing IT investments, be managed with existing frameworks and tools, and scale without disruption to meet future growth and organizational objectives.

The FlexPod® data center platform, jointly developed by NetApp and of

prevalidated storage, networking, and server technologies. It’s designed to increase IT responsiveness to organizational needs while reducing the overall cost of computing with maximum uptime and minimal risk.

Speed DeploymentImprove IT agility and reduce deployment time from months to

architecture that shortens the time needed to design, plan, and test.

Slash both administration time and TCO by 50% with a converged virtualized infrastructure that is easier

data than the alternatives.

Reduce RiskMinimize disruption with a prevalidated platform built on a

deployment guesswork and accommodates ongoing workload optimization.

Differentiators• A -

loads and scale, while leveraging existing IT components

• A broad range of reference architectures for popular top-tier applications

• A cooperative support model that requires only a single ticket to resolve issues

• A choice of management and orchestration solutions

FlexPod: Flexible Data Center Infrastructure to Accelerate Application Deployment

Investment Protection with Standardized, Flexible ITTogether, NetApp and Cisco offer a data center platform that’s ready for

enough to grow at your own pace to a fully private cloud. The FlexPod

right into your current infrastructure, leveraging existing resources and minimizing or eliminating technology replacement costs.

FlexPod components are integrated and standardized to help you achieve timely, repeatable, consistent deployments that eliminate guesswork and minimize risk. As a result, you can understand and better predict

capacity, performance, and cost of each FlexPod deployment.

Scalability for Any Cloud SolutionThe FlexPod platform is offered in three solution categories that are designed to meet your

requirements:

• FlexPod Express is ideal for midsized organizations and branch

cost-effective starting point for infrastructure consolidation and virtualization solutions.

• FlexPod Datacenter is suited for large enterprises and cloud service providers that have mature IT processes and rapid growth expectations and want to deploy a highly scalable shared infrastructure for multiple critical applications.

• FlexPod Select supports environments with a need for high-performance computing or very large

data capacity, including big data

dedicated application optimization.

Any of the FlexPod solutions can be scaled up or out and duplicated

growth needs. They can also scale

path that leverages all existing components and management processes.

Proven Across a Broad Range of EnvironmentsThe FlexPod platform has been pretested and jointly validated with popular hypervisors, operating systems, applications, and infrastructure software, including:

• VMware vSphere® • VMware® View®

• Citrix XenDesktop• Red Hat Enterprise Linux® • Oracle® (RAC, JD Edwards, Oracle

Linux, Oracle VM Server)• SAP®

• Microsoft® Exchange, SQL Server®, and SharePoint®

• Microsoft Private Cloud• Hortonworks Data Platform• Cloudera’s Distribution, including

Apache Hadoop• NetApp® SnapProtect® technology• Cisco Nexus® data center switches

FlexPod solutions can be optimized to support several of these workloads simultaneously. NetApp and Cisco have also jointly developed reference architectures to help you integrate

following critical environments:

• Workload consolidation. FlexPod is a versatile platform that helps you consolidate and virtualize your applications onto less hardware. Along with improved hardware utili-zation, this approach frees up data center space and reduces power and cooling requirements, enabling you to slash your infrastructure costs by up to 50%.

• Virtual desktop infrastructure. FlexPod is an easy-to-deploy, self-contained virtual desktop solution in a rack. Its modular design facilitates rapid, repeatable deployment of thousands of virtual desktops. FlexPod integrates with, and is optimized for, VMware View and Citrix XenDesktop. A virtual desktop solution built on FlexPod provides unmatched price/performance. You gain extreme

to 90% of redundant user and OS data, and I/O performance can be accelerated by up to 50% with the NetApp Virtual Storage Tier. The extended memory technology of

™ provides the industry’s greatest number of VMs per core density.

• Development and test. The FlexPod platform enables rapid provisioning and deprovisioning of virtual resources, making it an ideal platform for development and test environments. This capability is valued in any enterprise IT shop, especially Oracle Database environments. NetApp FlexClone®

help enable us to centrally manage all our data center requirements.”

Darrell WilliamsDirector of Information Systems, Katz, Sapper & Miller

software facilitates rapid dev/test setup with cloning technology that lets you deploy thousands

projects in minutes, accelerating time to production and time to market. Clones can also be redeployed to secondary sites, reducing preparation time for initiatives such as DR testing.

• Disaster recovery. The FlexPod

with integrated data protection software to provide fast recovery from system, site, and regional outages for business continuity. The combination of NetApp MetroCluster™ and SnapMirror® technologies with Cisco UCS® Manager and WAAS offers automated monitoring and failover as well as cost-effective replication to a secondary site for continuous protection against unplanned downtime. Our solution also lets you move virtual server and storage resources and data nondisruptively across hardware to eliminate planned downtime.

• Secure multi-tenancy and secure separation. FlexPod leverages the Cisco® SAFE architecture and NetApp MultiStore® technology to deliver a secure multi-tenancy architecture. Secure multi-tenancy enables resources and data for each tenant—application, department, or customer— to be securely isolated within the FlexPod environment. It combines the data separation and service-level guarantees offered by application silos with

virtualized infrastructure. FlexPod also securely separates nonvirtualized workloads across the data center and has undergone and passed several security compliance tests, PCI compliance validation, FISMA

Best-in-Class Components for Enhanced Data Center

FlexPod includes the following components in a standardized

entry-level designs for hundreds of users up to high-performance big data workloads for thousands of users. This integrated solution can

and operating expenses through end-to-end virtualization and higher

• System is a data center platform that is designed to eliminate time-

reduce TCO, and increase agility. Cisco UCS combines compute and network resources, storage access, and virtualization into a scalable, modular system that is easily managed as a single entity by Cisco UCS Manager. The

greatly reduces the number of devices that must be purchased,

automatic, policy-based hardware

for large, stateless computing

Cisco UCS extended memory technology also reduces memory requirements by up to 60%.

• Cisco Nexus data center switches

technology to identify and

effective architecture based on FCoE. Cisco Nexus switches offer “zero-touch” installation, automatic

scalability, and nondisruptive in-service upgrades. A single point of policy management also

security. The added option of the Cisco Nexus 7000 Series switch provides even greater networking scale, throughput, availability, and advanced features for data center interconnect requirements. Cisco Nexus 9000 switches lay the foundation for the Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure.

such as Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure allow intelligent software to automate hardware resources across next-generation data centers.

• NetApp FAS systems reduce cost and complexity for virtualized infrastructures by meeting all of your storage requirements with a single, highly scalable solution.

supports all protocols, so you no longer need to purchase separate systems to accommodate different storage needs. You can slash capacity use by up to 50% with built-in deduplication, thin

backup and cloning. NetApp systems enhance operational

management, data protection, and security. They also optimize

“Our executives loved the simplicity and power of the integrated stack in FlexPod. And for IT, the prevalidated architecture with prescriptive sizing and design guides reduced our risk.”

Wojciech BiernackiIT Systems Administrator, University of Tennessee

© 2015 NetApp, Inc. All rights reserved. No portions of this document may be reproduced without prior written consent of NetApp, AP, FlexClone, FlexPod, MetroCluster,

MultiStore, SnapMirror, and SnapProtect are trademarks or registered trademarks of NetApp, Inc. in the United States and/or other countries. VMware, View, and VMware vSphere are registered trademarks of VMware, Inc. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds. Oracle is a registered trademark of Oracle Corporation. SAP is a registered trademark of SAP AG. Microsoft, SharePoint, and SQL Server are registered trademarks of Microsoft Corporation. Cisco, Cisco Nexus, and Cisco UCS are registered trademarks

All other brands or products are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders and should be treated as such. DS-3467-0615

performance with innovative

and FCoE support. The clustered Data ONTAP® operating system brings a new level of nondisruptive operations, scalability, and

Extreme performance for dedicated

customers can deploy the exact

media for their particular application or environment without having to choose an all-or-nothing solution.

Cooperative Support to Speed Problem ResolutionFlexPod Cooperative Support is a partnership between NetApp, Cisco, and our technology partners Microsoft, VMware, Citrix, and Red Hat. Your IT staff chooses which vendor to call based on your initial assessment of the problem’s origin. Multivendor engineers work to resolve your issue quickly using shared communications, expertise gained through ongoing joint training, and a formal escalation process. The result is a rapid, coordinated resolution to your technical issue. FlexPod Cooperative Support helps keep your business-critical data center infrastructure up and running at peak performance.

Choice of Management SolutionsNetApp and Cisco work with trusted partners to provide you with a choice of management solutions. The FlexPod architecture provides APIs at each layer so that it can easily integrate with a broad range of software solutions for end-

to-end management. Validated FlexPod management solutions have been tested in NetApp and Cisco labs to verify that they deliver essential functionality. Together with partners, we provide a variety of capabilities, including automation and orchestration, monitoring

management.

Global Service Delivery EcosystemYou can choose from a global network of FlexPod Premium Partners and

partners to implement FlexPod. These partners understand your

NetApp, Cisco, and complementary technologies to deliver a complete

Getting StartedTo learn how the FlexPod platform

infrastructure today as your foundation for future-ready IT, contact your local NetApp or Cisco representative or partner. Learn more

Hyp

ervis

or/OS/Management and VDI

APPLICATIONS

Figure 1) FlexPod Cooperative Support Model: An Ecosystem of a multivendor engagement.

About IronbrickIronBrick works with large govern-ment and commercial organizations solving complex information technol-ogy challenges in the data center. Think of us as a specialized system integrator, dedicated to your data center infrastructure. With decades of experience and intellectual property, our solutions focus on storage, servers, virtualization, data analytics and management.

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